Painting guide
Repainting Painted Brick in Nashville: What to Check Before Another Coat
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The brick on the house is painted, the coating looks tired, and the plan is another coat. That is a maintenance decision on an existing system and it is a reasonable one.
Before it happens, the wall is worth reading properly, because masonry does something no other substrate on a house does: it holds water, moves it, and releases it, and the coating on it is part of that system whether anyone intended it to be. That makes recoating brick a sequence of dependent questions rather than a single decision, and each one narrows the next.
First: is the brick painted, or does it just look it?
This sounds like a formality and it decides whether any of the rest applies to you.
If the brick is already painted, everything below applies. You are assessing an existing coating on a wall whose behavior was set years ago by whoever first coated it.
If the brick is bare, stop. Painting previously unpainted masonry is a different decision, and one this guide does not advise on, for a specific reason: it is effectively permanent. Coating removal from brick is difficult, and the methods that work carry a real risk of damaging the brick face. A wall that has never been painted can be cleaned, repointed, and left as brick. A wall that has been painted stays painted, in practice, for the rest of the building’s life.
That is not an argument against it. Painted brick is a legitimate choice made on thousands of houses. It is an argument for making the decision knowingly rather than as a side effect of a repaint.
If you are not certain which you have, look at a sheltered area, inside a porch or under an overhang, where any coating would be least weathered. Look also at the mortar joints: a coated wall usually has coating on the mortar as well, and bare mortar against apparently colored brick often means what you are seeing is the brick itself.
What the coating is telling you
Assess the existing film before deciding anything about the next one.
The first of these readings removes coating in order to produce its answer. Where the building predates 1978, the lead-safe question is settled before the knife, and painted masonry is not an exception: Painting a Pre-1978 Nashville Home: When EPA Lead-Safe Rules May Apply.
Adhesion. Press a putty knife edge under any spot where the film is raised. Sound coating on masonry resists. Coating that lifts easily, and keeps lifting past the visible edge, is releasing across a larger area than it looks.
Blistering. The film has raised into bubbles, some intact and some broken open. On masonry these usually mean moisture behind the coating rather than heat, and where they cluster tells you where the water is arriving.
Sheet lifting. The coating comes away in large pieces rather than flakes. That points at either a bond that never formed properly or, more often, sustained moisture pressure pushing from behind.
Erosion and thinning. The coating has worn back far enough that the texture of the brick shows through. This is normal on an old coating and it is useful, because the thin areas are where the wall breathes most and where the next assessment is easiest to make.
Where the coating lifts, look at what is underneath. Sound brick means a coating question. Brick face crumbling behind the film is something else.
White deposits and crumbling faces
Two conditions show up on painted brick that look equally alarming and mean quite different things, and both of them are about water.
Efflorescence is a white, powdery or crystalline deposit, usually appearing after wet weather and often near the bottom of a wall. It is salt: water moves through masonry, dissolves soluble salts, carries them to the surface, and evaporates, leaving them behind. It tells you water is moving through that wall. It also prevents coating adhesion, because the new film would be bonding to a layer of salt.
Spalling is the face of the brick breaking away, leaving a rough, recessed area. Under paint it usually means water got into the brick, could not leave through the coating, and expanded when it froze. Each cycle takes a little more of the face.
Efflorescence is a signal. Spalling is damage. Both point at the same underlying issue, and neither is solved by another coat of paint. Efflorescence must be removed before coating and will return if the water source continues. Spalled brick needs assessment by someone who works on masonry, because the question is how deep it goes.
Where the water is coming from
Masonry walls get wet from more directions than siding does, and the source determines whether recoating is maintenance or a mistake.
From above. Coping on a parapet may have failed or gone missing, a gutter may be overflowing onto the wall, or a roof edge may have too little overhang to throw water clear. Water that enters the top of a masonry wall travels down inside it and emerges a long way from where it got in.
From below. Ground contact, splash, and capillary rise all deliver water to the base of a wall, and the problem is worst where soil or paving sits against the wall at or above the level of the interior floor. This produces damage concentrated in the lowest courses.
Through the face. Driving rain on an exposed elevation gets in through eroded mortar joints, and on some walls through the brick face itself, which is more porous than it looks.
From inside. This one is less common and still worth knowing about, because interior moisture can move outward through the wall assembly and reach the back of the coating from the direction nobody checks.
A wall showing blistering, efflorescence or spalling has a water source, and the recoat will fail in the same places unless that source is dealt with.
What the mortar is doing
The mortar gets overlooked because the eye reads a brick wall as brick, and the mortar is usually where the water gets in.
Mortar is softer than brick by design, so that movement and salt damage occur in the joints, which are repairable, rather than in the units, which are not. That design works until the joints erode. Eroded, cracked or missing mortar lets water into the wall directly, and no coating on the face compensates for it.
Look at the joints across each elevation, particularly on the weather side and low on the wall. Sound joints are flush or slightly recessed with a firm surface. Failed joints are soft enough to scrape with a key, hollow behind, cracked along their length, or missing sections entirely.
Failed joints carry two consequences for the project. Repointing precedes painting, because new mortar needs time to cure and because coating over failed joints seals a defect rather than fixing it. And repointing changes the surface, since fresh mortar has different absorbency from the masonry around it, which affects both the appearance of the finished wall and the coating decision itself.
A wall that needs significant repointing is not a repaint that also needs some pointing. It is a masonry repair with a repaint at the end.
Water arriving is only half of it. What decides whether the wall can get rid of that water again was settled by whoever coated it first.
Why the previous coating matters
The wall in front of you was coated by somebody who made choices, and those choices are still operating.
What was used. Masonry has been coated with many different products over the decades, and they differ enormously in how much water vapor they let through. A wall coated with something largely impermeable has been holding moisture in for as long as that coating has been on it, which is often exactly why it is now blistering.
How the surface was prepared. Efflorescence left in place, a wall coated while damp, or a surface never cleaned all produce a bond that was compromised from the start. Failure that appears general rather than concentrated at a water source often points here.
How many coats. Multiple layers on masonry compound the permeability problem, because each one adds resistance to drying.
None of this is recoverable in detail. Practically, a wall with widespread adhesion failure and no obvious water source may be telling you about the original coating rather than anything happening now, and that changes the remedy: more removal, and a more permeable product going back on.
The permeability question
Everything above turns on one property of the coating, and it is the property nobody asks about at the counter.
Masonry gets wet and then dries. A coating on it affects both. A coating that resists water entering also resists water leaving, and if more water gets in from other routes than can escape through the face, the wall accumulates moisture behind the film. That is the mechanism behind most blistering and much spalling on painted brick.
Coatings differ significantly in how much water vapor they let through, and the figure is published as a permeability rating. A wall that is getting wet from an unresolved source needs a coating that lets it dry, not one that seals it further. Which product suits your wall is answered by its technical data, and the question to bring to that data is not which product is toughest but which one lets this wall breathe as much as it needs to.
Before you recoat
Six checks, in this order, and any one of them can change the plan.
Confirm the brick is already painted. Assess adhesion across each elevation with a knife, not by eye. Look for efflorescence, particularly low on the wall and after wet weather. Look for spalling under lifted or blistered coating. Identify where water is arriving, above, below and through. And check the mortar joints, because eroded or failed pointing lets water into a wall regardless of what is on the face, and it is repaired first, with the coating following on behind.
Then, if the wall is sound and the water is dealt with, the recoat is a normal project with one unusual requirement: the product is chosen for permeability as much as for appearance.
One more check for older properties
If the house sits in a historic overlay district, exterior work can fall under local review before it starts. Whether one applies to your property is settled in When Historic Zoning Review Can Apply to Exterior Painting in Nashville, a Metro question with its own process and a lookup rather than a judgment call. Settle it while the project is still on paper, because the answer can change what is permitted and not simply add a step to getting there.
Source. Two Sherwin-Williams problem-solver articles, both opened 10 September 2026. Efflorescence, https://www.sherwin-williams.com/painting-contractors/products/resources/SW-ARTICLE-PRO-EFFLORESCENCE: crusty white salt deposits leached to the surface as water passes through mortar or masonry, dependent on both salt and moisture being present, with crystal growth continuing as long as both remain, and appearing as narrow bands along mortar joints where the mortar is the source. Blistering, https://www.sherwin-williams.com/painting-contractors/products/resources/SW-ARTICLE-PRO-BLISTERING: bubbles caused by loss of adhesion and lifting of the film, with moisture blistering attributed to water migrating through a wall and pushing the paint off the surface. Permeability ratings and product selection come from a product’s own technical data.